Greedy Goblin

Wednesday, July 4, 2012

The EVE Offline curse

I found it hard to figure out why the great game of EVE Online is not more popular. Sure, having consequences for your actions keep total idiots out and griefing annoys some just because it's "evil", but still there should be a much larger population. After all in many games defeat has consequences and griefing is possible even in WoW.

At the Logistics checklist post I found another reason: the EVE Offline curse. It comes with the claim: "ships are designed by ccp with all-level-5-skills in mind. fleet setups are designed, usually with level 5 skills in mind. If you cannot afford to train all relevant skills to V you shouldn't be flying the ship yet." In other words: in the first year of playing don't even bother to undock your ship, just log in to queue the next skill. OK, you can undock in a Rifter to lol around but don't even dream of doing anything worth mentioning.

The above demand is totally idiotic. The skills are usually in the form of "giving 5% bonus per level", maybe "giving 10% bonus per level". If we divide the level 4 result by the level 5 result, we get 120/125 = 0.96 and 140/150 = 0.93. Learning a rank 1 skill to level 5 takes 256000 points, while level 4 takes 45255 pt. Spending 18% of the training time gives you 96/93% of the effect. The other 82% gives you the remaining 4/7%. Clearly a new player, when faced with this nonsense will give up playing after a few months. I mean it's totally unrealistic for someone to subscribe a game for a year without playing it.

What can CCP do to end it? They already did everything they could by removing the learning skills (except Cybernetics). They purposefully made rank 5 a small increase over a large investment. The problem is not their doing, players are rising artificial barriers, just like the infamous "LFM random HC must have raid instance level gearscore" in WoW.

Why do they do it? Is it just pointless elitism saying "Just because I played a year longer, I'm so much better than you that you shouldn't even bother to undock"? No, I think it's rather based on the collectivist organization of alliances and fleets. I mean the pilots have no word in the strategy but they also have no risks and responsibilities. Their ships are given by the alliance and will be replaced for free if destroyed. It is indeed unreasonable to ask the FC to redesign the fleet doctrine and give out a free ship just to let you tag along.

There are special fleets in the TEST alliance, called kitchen sink. There you can fly whatever you want. These fleets aren't performing that bad. The infamous Laser Rokh + Retreiver fleet got nearly 50% ISK efficiency against a "perfect doctrine" fleet. How? Because the individual pilots weren't F1-drones, but thinking people who fit their ships to their strengths and weaknesses.

CCP clearly designed the game with the "every ship is useful" idea, making a uniform all-drake fleet largely sub-optimal. Why does anyone field a bad fleet? Because it's easy to mass-produce and easy to micro-manage. Practically it's equal to a multibox fleet where the multiboxing hardware is the voice comm. The statement of "Intelligent human > 4-lines bot" is obvious. "Good fleet composition > multibox" is obvious too. You don't see such fleets in the alliance tournament or even in small-gang roams.

The uniform "doctrine" fleets are optimized to a "smart FC, dumb F1-drones" scheme. Trying to break it would be a disaster. Left on their own devices, most players would get in a cheap terrible-fit (or over-pimped terrible-fit if the alliance pays the bills) and get devastated. While "Intelligent human > F1-drone" is true, "Average player > F1-drone" is absolutely not.

One can easily figure out an "easy" solution: F1 drones fly uniformed ships, smart people act on their own. However the FC asking "who are smart people here?" wouldn't be the best way to determine. How can we make that choice? TEST figured that out too: as independence always comes with responsibility, the kitchen sink fleets are not reinbursed. If your idea didn't work out (or you joined with bad FC or bad fleet) you won't get your ship back. You have to play with your own money.

I can't imagine that there is a large-fleet FC (killboard junkies are different) who would reject a pilot saying: "take me, I can keep the speed with the others and do what I can. If I pop, it costs you nothing". After all, even if he does nothing at all, he still serve as decoy, if he is primaried, he just saved someone else from being primary. I can't imagine that any FC would reject my logi just because it has 12% smaller tank and heals 8% less. On the other hand he is completely right to reject me flying his money in a sub-optimal ship at sub-optimal efficiency.

It's not the job of CCP to end the EVE Offline curse. It's not the job of the FC to redesign his doctrine and toss a free ship just to accept a special snowflake. It is your job to break it by taking the financial responsibility of your actions. Ask your FC two questions: speed and optimal range. Fit whatever you want to fly and offer your services to the fleet on your own money, without asking them to help you buy the ship or to replace it if lost.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it's just dumb elitism like the infamous "you must have raid gear for a faceroll dungeon" in WoW WotLK. Maybe TEST is a special place with a special culture. Then I was wrong yesterday too. If it is the case, if only TEST fields kitchen sink fleets and the victory of SoCo would mean the end of such fleets, then it is something worth fighting for. If you know of kitchen-sink fleets in other alliances, or if you are sure that this or that alliance would not allow custom ships to join even for free, please comment.

PS: My plan of learning logi is still too EVE-Offline as the logi pilot is almost 3 months old and still more than a month away from flying it. The fastest path is learning Cybernetics 4 on the starter remap, get +4 implants and learn Signature analysis and Long range targeting 5 (both needed to learn Logistics skill). Learn the rest of the support skills to level 3. These take 15 days. Then remap P7-W7, learn faction cruiser 5 and Logistics 3. That takes 24.3 days and you are ready to fly. You'll suck but you'll be able to escort someone to L4 or disappear in a blop (get MWD). Continue learning logistics to 5 (25 more days), then remap I10-M4 and pull up your support skills to 4, then 5. The reason why I did not follow this path is that I go for a carrier and I'd run out of remaps (PW, IM, back to PW for carrier, back to IM for capital support skills). My way is IM for all support to 4-5, PW for logi and carrier, back IM for capital support and lvl 5s).

Wednesday morning report: 82.7B (1.5B spent on main accounts, 1.3 spent on logi, 1.0 on Ragnarok, 0.5 on Rorqual, 0.9 on Nyx, 0.8 on Avatar, 2.6B received as gift).

26 comments:

Your effectiveness calculations are a little off here. Yes, skills themselves provide linear increase in effect with level (so with exponential growth of training time it is true, that lvl5 is pretty much not an effective way to spend training time, compared to lvl4), but there are more to that, then just skill own effects. Some skills require lvl5 of other skills to be accessible at all (and they require not just some x1-x4 basic skills, but x16 monsters as well). Some skills tend to stack in so interesting way, that 1 level of that skills provide not listed 5% increase in efficiency, but much more. Some modules require lvl5 to fit (and though there are alternatives with the same or even better effect, they are naturally pretty expensive, as most of them are rare random drops).Just to clear some mathematic, everything else sounds valid.

There are certainly skills where lvl 5 is a big deal. Logi is arguably one of them, as well as gateway skills that open up T2 paths, but plenty of fine ship setups can be flown without many lvl 5 skills.

This is exactly how most fleets work though. If your ship doesn't follow the doctrine, you don't get reimbursed. So you can fly a tackling scimitar if you want (they are actually pretty good at it!), but you won't get any money back. Seems fair enough.

As for a drake fleet, it's not just drakes, just the majority. A drakefleet will consist of drakes for dps, scimitars for logistics, claymores for fleetbonuses, hictors and dictors for bubbling, and usually some interceptors for long range tackling. And in CFC, almost always a few newbee rifters doing their part.

And again, your premise is flawed. Sure, logistics take a while to train for. But you can fly a drake reasonably well after about 30 days, and pretty well after 60 days. There are tons of other alternatives also.

Fleet doctrines are called when the alliance needs to be more certain of the outcome. It comes back to knowing your own capabilities - if I have a 70% chance that my thrown together fleet will have capability = X but if I put together a doctrine fleet I know that I have X-n capability but I can guarantee that capability. Certainty is always preferred. It's been said that large alliance leaders merely play a vast real-time strategy game. It is only when a certain fitting is mandated that the ships get replaced by the alliance - any other fleets only have general guidelines: frigates/cruisers/battlecruisers, armor/shield, longrange/shortrange. and people bring what they can afford to lose.

also: as mentioned above - all drakefleets or alphafleets etc have a certain percentage of small tackle, a very small number of HICs and some logistics - these people (perhaps I'm biased as I fly a HIC) need to display a bit more initiative than the rest of their fleet due to their critical role. the FC can't micromanage the logistics or tacklers.

You are right about most skills.Training to lvl 4 is stupid.HOWEVER, the skills one needs for pvp MUST be lvl 5.

And there are PLENTY of those skills.

I started to do pvp in a Drake in 2007 and INSISTED to keep flying Drakes even tho 99% of the people laughed at me...until Drake become the flavor in fleets.

Anyway, I was not havinf enough dps and enough tank with all skills at lvl 4.I had to train missiles (both HAM and HML) to 5 so i can train specialization to 5.Also engineering, mechanincs and electronics.Also ALL shield realted skills, like the resist to passives and active shields and tactical manipulation.While Overloading is not really needed at 5 it is better to do it.

I cannot even start about Gunery.In gunnery you need even more skills at 5.I know because I am not only trained in Caldari.I can fly all BS races and all HAC races.Logis, only Caldari.

Wanna be a logi pilot AND in the same time have fun and provide help for the fleet? Train every shit to lvl 5.

You don't understand now, but a shield rep of 2000 compared to a 2200 one is much weaker than those 10% you think.

Go in null and live there for a while.You will see the diference between theory and practice.

In theory, you make sense.I don't think EVE quite works that way. How many FCs (as opposed to CEOs) really care whether the alliance or the pilot is funding the ship? In neither case is it the FC. And God forbid the untraditional pilot dies.You hurt the Killboard and all the other little boys will belittle you in the forums. And unusual fits are more likely to get mentioned. Except for the kitchen sink, freedom for freedoms sake, feet, the risk/reward for a FC to allow diversity is low. Besides, there is the traditional role of suicide tacklers for people with less than a year of SP.

I also think that logistically it is easier to keep a standard fleet available in 0.0 than if there is too much diversity.

I have yet to read any idea for making EVE more popular or accessible that was supported by the players or at least forum posters.

From what I've seen, the reason that L5 is important is because it allows normally pushes you past a CPU/Power threshold that allows you to fit better or more modules.Still, I think most skills at L4 normally seems to be good enough to get started. Sure, an L5 pilot would beat an L4, but two L4s would beat one L5.

Is this leading to the formation of the "Underskilled" Corp? No L5 skills permitted except those required to learn other skills. No set ship designs only basic guidelines?

in a more "elite pvp" environment that might be:Rifter -> Stiletto -> Hound -> Sabre(picking up probing skills somewhere along the way)

Both of these paths would get you into a lot of fleets from day 1 (I'd prefer the second one for pvp-oriented players as it will make you a really valuable asset to quite literally *any* fleet but it doesn't entail a good ratting ship so ISK might be a problem).

TEST didn't use any AHAC fleets for one and a half years (despite constant demands for them) because the SP requirements for that fleet composition were deemed to be too high relative to the age of most TEST pilots.

Not to mention that even once you have spent half a year training for your Guardian you will be completely useless to at least three out of four fleets (armor battleships are even less used today than they were a year ago, most alliances go with shield doctrines these days).

Nobody will scoff at a Drake with lvl3 or 4 skills, but don't come crying if an AHAC fitting requires T2 guns and AWU V.Or if you get left behind in your carrier because nobody can be bothered to slow down the whole fleet for one guy with JDC4.

Training skills to lvl5 often makes a bigger difference in performance than the raw numbers would suggest.

Some of them are requirements for decent fittings (e.g. AWU V, Recon V, Logi V for Scimitars), some of them give you additional bonuses beyond their raw stat increase (e.g. access to t2 ammo - entirely no point using t1 pulse lasers, barrage is very nice to have for projectiles), some of them are required so you can use your ship properly (Logi V for Guardians, Tactical Weapons Reconfig. V for dreads) and sometimes they just feel really useful for certain ships (e.g. no matter what EFT might tell you Abaddons felt pretty weak to me - until I had Amarr Battleship V).

Most (but not all) T1 ships are very tolerant to low skills and the designers of fleet doctrines pay attention that standard fitting remain accessible to a wide variety of players.

T2 cruisers and beyond are where you get into the "perfect skills required" territory but nobody expects newbies to train for these within the first 6 months or so.

Veterans tend to take a very different view to skill training compared to new players - once you have a few 30+ days skills under your belt you just stop seeing the big issue with having to devote a few weeks to train for some role.And there might of course be some sort of ex-post rationalization going on - I spent 40 days training this skill, now I will *feel* a big improvement in performance to justify that investment.

But in general I think you are struggling with a problem of your own making.

I think the problem here is that you have stated you want to fly logistics. The impression is that this is all you want to fly. You are applying some "healer class" mentality (evidenced by the clear guardian -> triage carrier progression).

Tech 2 is hard to fly. Its not even just the space ship command skills which are time consuming to get into, to fit a T2 ship properly you need a tonne of supporting skills, and it is often beneficial to have these maxed out.

For most Tech 2 ships, level 5 of its relevant space ship command skill is also very beneficial. Logistics 4 is considered 'minimum' for guardians, but our fleets wont accept any guardian pilots unless they are level 5 - not level 5 yet, go jump in some cheap DPS and mash F1.

I appreciate that you want to fly what you want to fly - goals are always good. But despite all the talk in eve about progression going out the window in favor of role fulfilling ships, there is a clear progression between T1 ships and T2 ships.

You should get out in a tackling rifter first. Move up to T2 frigates, progress into being a skillful cruiser and battlecruiser pilot. All of the knowledge you gain from doing this will do wonders for your ability to be an effective guardian pilot. You'll learn from experience who needs to be locked up because you anticipate that they will broadcast for reps any second as they get yellow boxed by everything.

You'll learn what ships you personally need to watch out for (having probably by now been involved in the dismantling of logistics chains from an offensive position many times over).

Again, fly whatever you want, however you want, whenever you want - but you shouldn't think for an instant that this is the best/most appropriate way to do it. You'll annoy logi bosses and FCs and find yourself on the outer instead of being the hero logi.

Nobody is saying "don't login for a year and a half". Nobody *once* suggested that. Its just been suggested that maybe you should take some time, fly other things, and get some PvP basics under your belt before hand. Who knows, you may end up discovering that you don't want to logi - you'd rather specialise in neut boats, or high dps brawlers, or ewar.

@Avensys, Anonymous: I never said "guardian" I said "logi, probably guardian". Learning another logi isn't hard (like 2 weeks) after you learned one. My very first idea was a Basilisk, but that would need someone to trade energy, so I'll probably go with Scimitar.

And yes, I want to fly a logi. I don't want to fly rifters, trashers, battlecruisers, especially they take my training time an place skillpoints where I won't use them. I know that T2 is hard and I accept that. I don't accept people artificially making it harder and telling that I should go to Rifter/trasher/F1-drone detail for a year.

As many EVE leaders, including the Mittani, have concluded, defeating an enemy alliance is an exercise in destruction of morale, not ISK.

The higher the "hope" of a fleet, the bigger the loss in morale at defeat. You don't want to fly with a dozen logis feeling strong, only to find out they are lvl 4 - stragglers and get wiped by a PL gank a third of your number and be made the laughing stock of EVE for the day.

The strength of a kitchen fleet is not the financial responsibility, but the refusal of having high hopes for success.

In the end of the day, capsuleers are immortal, and there are plenty of ways to fill their wallets. In the end of the day, morale is what counts.

Id actually have to agree with this part of his statement "ships are designed by ccp with all-level-5-skills in mind" as far as tech II/III ships are concerned. Just look at logistics ships, logi 5 is the difference between needing 1 or 2 energy transfers. The sole reason you use guardians/basi's over the other two is provide cap to your fleet. You cant do this with a fleet of logi 4 pilots. The difference in effectiveness is infinite.

Actually it was a commenter on a previous post that said you need all skills to 5 to fly any ship. That said, Gevlon isn't helping his case by holding out to fly a Guardian/Basilisk.

There are some skills for which the bonus per level is so great that you almost certainly want to train them to 5. Logistics is one of them. There are also a load of core skills that aid stuff like fitting that are really useful to train to 5 as they apply to every ship you may ever fly - go look at the "Core" certificates in EveMon.

As far as fleet doctrines go it also depends on the alliance. As said Test have Kitchen Sink fleets, also I believe that Goons are less fussy about fleet composition. Some "elite" alliances are much more strict - even to the degree that they have minimum specs for your PC so you don't suffer from game-lag. Some of the mercenaries in the game are very loss-averse as losses look bad to potential clients (who often have to reimburse them.) These are the places where you will be ridiculed for flying the wrong ship, a badly fit ship, or not having the skills to fly the preferred fitting.

Also one of the things that you're missing comes - again - from lack of real PvP experience. There are some advantages to uniformity when it comes to certain types of tactics. Having a bunch of ships that all do damage at the same range, and travel at the same speed allows you to keep the fleet in a blob. That allows you to more easily keep the logistics in range of the entire fleet.

All that said there are plenty of places where variety matters more, smaller gang PvP - eg low-sec pirates or some of the groups in Syndicate will use more varied fleet compositions. Simply because in these situations it's not simply DPS-wins, a single Falcon could be enough to allow you to engage a fleet double your size. So you're looking for an edge.

As an aside - as I've not had time to comment for a couple of days - I'd like to address Gevlon's desire to play logistics-only.

Gevlon, you will almost certainly not be able to FC a fleet whilst flying logistics. In fact if you only ever fly logistics, then becoming an FC will be quite a challenge. Of course if you don't want to FC, that won't be an issue - but I believe you've called raids in WoW before, so wanted to address it in case it was a goal in Eve.

On the T2 logistics ships themselves, each has two bonuses - although the remote tracking bonuses on Scimitar and Oneiros are almost never used, instead the ships are fit with cap-boosting mods that allow them to operate independently. That difference, along with the other differences between shield-tanking and armour-tanking means that the 4 ships are all used slightly differently, and there are slight differences to fly them well in a fleet.

Finally, I'll echo some of the other comments to get out there and get some experience - even if it's flying a tackle rifter. Whilst flying a Drake in a blob may be reduced to locking the target the FC calls and pressing F1 - if you're flying in a support role there's usually more to manage. Being in some fleets and taking part, will allow you to first-hand observe and analyse what is happening, which will hopefully give you more awareness for when you do actually fly support. You are going to have screw-ups whilst you're learning the ropes - and if you do those whilst flying logistics then other people will lose ships too - ultimately you're risking being the logistics guy that no FC wants in his fleet...

you are wrong.as an fc i need to know more than optimal range and speed.

i need to know how much damage my fleet can ditch out

i need to know how much damage they can take

i need to know when their capacitors would run outat what distance how many can provide tackle.

i need my logistics to be of the same type as the tank of the ones they are supposed to fix

i need to know the signature size of my fleets ships

i need to know at what distance they can go at full speed

i need to know how long they need to get aligned.

telling people to break the doctrine and take financial responsibility is bullhit.

And for a good reason most corps will kick you out if you come in the wrong ship with the wrong fit all the time.

a while ago, when i was in a huge alliance, we had an op. and there was a guy tagging along who was only in the alliance because his girlfriend was one of the higher ups.

Since he was new to eve he actually brought a drake - without even having the proper skills, and with a horrible selfmade fit.So when ever we would warp from gate to gate he would be out of capacitor.our way back from the fight took us over 2 hours because of him - for a trip the rest of the fleet would have done in 40 minutes.during those two hours we could have been hot dropped and lost the complete fleet. Basically his selfish behaviour could have gotten the whole fleet killed.

Another example,on a movement op we had a (fresh) titan pilot with us. his fit was, lets say creative. he did not know how to handle the ship either (he was playing for 9 month and had bought character and ship). we had to wait almost 15 minutes after each jump for him to regain cap, and he did stupid shit like in the middle of the movement decide to jump on a lowsec gatecamp with the titan - and we had to commit our capital fleet which was fit for cap recharge and fully loaded with ships and replacement modules, to save his sorry ass.

The reason why we don't want people in creative own fits is not because we don't believe that other fits might work, its because we don't know the numbers that we need to know if people do that, and we know we got a lose cannon there as well.

If you want to achieve certain goals and prevent your hostiles to achieve some of theirs.

Also your assessment of the role of a tackler not doing anything worth mentioning is bullshit. There are two things that you cant have enough in a fleet. That's logistics and tacklers.

A tackler (and interceptor > rifter) can be trained in a few weeks. Not a year.And i rather have 1 new guy in an interceptor in my fleet, than having 5 guys in logistics that have no prior fleet battle experience, and not the right set of skills.

PS: 50% isk efficiency is a *horrible* number, its not even close to being OK.

"I don't accept people artificially making it harder and telling that I should go to Rifter/trasher/F1-drone detail for a year."

This isn't about in-game character skills, this is about your real-life experience of the game. There's nothing stopping you from still min/maxing your logistics character, but surely you can spare a week of training on another character, and using that to gain that experience.

Personally I'd say without it, it's actually you that's artificially raising your own barrier of being productive in any role in a fleet. You could spend the next couple of months whilst your character trains reading up on every aspect of PvP - but none of that theory is worthwhile until you've been tested on the battlefield. In this aspect Eve is similar to real-life war and armies.

Hell at worst you can find one of the open-entry null-sec roams (RvB Ganked is one - but there are others) and tag along. You're not going to gain as much as you might from tagging along on an Agony Unleashed PvP class for example.

The point here Gevlon, is not whether or not you can go straight for a guardian. That is fairly easy to do (select guardian in evemon and add to plan. Add the pre-reqs and follow the plan religiously)

But flying a guardian (or any logistics, it doesn't matter) is one of the most difficult things to do to begin with. You need to watch your cap, manually pilot, watch ranges,watch for incoming neuts, watch your targets - all the while watching broadcast while some monkey repeatedly spams the broadcast for reps button.

You *need* to have some appreciation for how PvP in general works to be effective at it. Any logi pilot who trains straight for logi with no prior PvP experience in eve is going to die. Worse, its going to get fleet mates killed.

Your assertion is correct, you don't "need" to go through all those things you don't want to fly (which are by the way, incredibly rewarding and fun to fly), but it is the height of arrogance to brush the advice being given to you to do those things aside.

Your first few fights you will panic. Absolutely you will. fumbling around not knowing what you are meant to be doing while you are charged with keeping potentially billions of isk worth of ships alive is demonstrably silly.

Here's another example of something which happens all the time in the wormhole I live in:

You join a wormhole corp, and a fleet is forming up. They already have enough guardians - skilled, proven guardian pilots that they know and trust to do their work. The FC asks you to hop into a DPS boat instead. What is your answer going to be? Hint: if you answer "i can only fly logi", you wont last long in corp - thats assuming a pvp corp lets you in as such an inflexible pilot to begin with.

It has no ranked pvp system (where you meet similar skilled players) in an instanced environment.Current PvP requires you to invest (time) in your ship, which does not support experimentation when it comes to strategy.

It is a grind, like Vanilla WoW. It just requires time investment and repeated activities to compete. I believe a game with such a model is not good for competitive play; the competitiveness gets artificially influenced by efficiency and time investment rather than by learning curves.

The level of strategy I look for in a game does not seem possible in EVE. Having to make a ship to test out a strategy is inefficient for a competitive pvp-er. Having to sacrifice hundreds of ships (that require resources and time investment) just to master strategies doesn't sound appealing or something I would do. If the depth of this game doesn't require you to burn through hundreds of ships it wouldnt be the game for me anyway.

I do not know how EVE works on a detailed level. I would however subscribe and try EVE for 3 months if they add a ranked instanced pvp server where people could have matches between an x number of ships fairly distributed for both sides.

"individual pilots weren't F1-drones, but thinking people who fit their ships to their strengths and weaknesses. "

If you don't know already - you probably don't - that fleet was a joke. It wasn't people being smart, they DELIBERATELY chose ridiculous fits. If they won on ISK it's because their opponents flew more expensive ships, or because their opponents were outnumbered, or made a bad call. Take one of those fleets to a real fight and you'll get torn to bits every time by uniformity.

On another note, if you don't want to wait just buy a maxed out character for 30b and stop worrying about skills. 30b can be made in a few weeks, but training a maxed out character from scratch will take you a decade. (Character trading for ISK is allowed in EVE, unlike in WoW?)

@annonymous 0321What kind of history would that character have? Hoe many times would you need to deal with friends/enemies from years in that character's past? Maybe even a crap name that you now have to live with.

Im trying my best to get your Ideas to a larger crowd of the EVE community (Not that you need any kind of approval by peers, i simply would like the community to learn and think about your ideas). My latest attempt is Reddit-post . Have a look at the comments and please explain to me what happened there. Is this 'just' plain stupidity?

He's not completely wrong, but he is mashing together two things, fleet doctrines and SP elitism.

Fleet doctrines exist for reasons he doesn't understand, but SP elitism usually exists way, way outside of these fleets. In fact, you most normally see it in highsec, among carebears running PVE missions / Incursions.

Fleet doctines exist because of effectiveness, and *scalable effectiveness* - two concepts that are crucial.

OP is seeing it backwards, instead of "I'll bring anything, better than nothing, right?" he should be thinking that "Yes, since it is the doctine ship I can both fly it and am optimized in it. This helps both myself, the fleet and the alliance as a whole as a result."

You need to push a doctrine, as kitchen sink fleets *will* get ripped apart otherwise. One battlereport where 50% efficiency was achieved despite outnumbering the opponent is not a good example against this.

@Anon 21:50I am talking about something different when I discuss experimentation. How long would it take someone to try out a wide range of tactics in different fittings?How much would it cost me (time wise) to try out 20x a ship (and I would probably do this with quite a few ships) in different pvp battles?

There are serious barriers to competitive play. Your pvp units require resources! The chance of finding an equal battle where skill is the dominating factor will be small (always tough to find in non pre arranged world pvp). The players who played this game longer do not only have an advantage when it comes to knowledge, they also have more resources available (and used their previous resources to increase their skills/knowledge). Catching up, even with an above average learning curve, seems brutal at best. Even if EVE had ranked PVP it would take too long to play on a top level, it most likely wouldn't be worth the time investment.

Will I eventually lose 50% of the battles I engage in because my wins match me vs better and more challenging (fun) opponents? My brains gives me more rewards if I lose a very strategic battle where I learned something than a win versus a bad opponent.

What I imagined with competitive play is nearly equal battles in an ranked instanced environment. I do know this is impossible to implement. Battles between equal fleets (although large scale pvp does not allow complex communication), perhaps between small fleets where you can switch between ships with basic AI for non player controlled units.

I dismiss any online multiplayer game where time/resources rather than strategic decisions influence battle outcomes. I dismiss any online game where I am not forced against similar or better opponents.